Sight word
Sight words, often also called high frequency sight words, are commonly used words that young children are encouraged to memorize as a whole by sight. Whole word advocates believe that they can learn to automatically recognize these words in print without having to use any strategies to decode.[1]
Sight words account for a large percentage (up to 75%) of the words used in beginning children's print materials.[2] Whole language and balanced literacy advocates believe that the advantage for children being able to recognize sight words automatically is that a beginning reader will be able to identify the majority of words in a beginning text before they even attempt to read it; therefore, allowing the child to concentrate on meaning and comprehension as they read without having to stop and decode every single word.[2] Advocates of whole-word instruction believe that being able to recognize a large number of sight words gives students a better start to learning to read.[1]
Contrary opinion was expressed by Rudolf Flesch in his famous 1955 book Why Johnny Can't Read. Flesch blamed sight-words for the increase of functional illiteracy in the US. Proponents of synthetic phonics argue that children must first learn the alphabet, then the sounds represented by the letters, then the blends of those sounds, and that children should never memorize words as visual designs.
A number of sight word lists have been compiled and published; among the most popular are the Dolch sight words and the magic 100 words. These lists have similar attributes, as they all aim to divide words into levels which are prioritised and introduced to children according to frequency of appearance in beginning readers' texts. Although many of the lists have overlapping content, the order of frequency of sight words varies and can be argued depending on contexts such as geographical location, empirical data, samples used, and year of publication.[3] Readsters' Comparing the Dolch and Fry High Frequency Word Lists examines the history and overlap of the Dolch and Fry lists.
Phonics programs teach the majority of the "sight words" in order with other phonetic patterns. For example, Blend Phonics, a free to print phonics program, teaches all but 40 of the 220 Dolch words using phonetic principles. A pro-phonics sight word page explains how to teach all but 2 of the 220 Dolch sight words and Fry 100 sight words with phonics.
The term sight words is often confused with the recognition of words by sight, or otherwise called sight vocabulary, which is defined as each person's own bank of vocabulary that the person recognizes instantly without having to decode.[4]
Recent brain research by Stanislas Dehaene found that the brains of good readers were processing individual letters and bigrams such as "ch" or "oa" at the same time in a parallel architecture. He states that the "massively parallel architecture explains the speed and robustness of visual word recognition. Most importantly, for educators and teachers, it creates an illusion of whole-word reading."[5]
See also
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References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Ravitch, Diane. (2007). EdSpeak : A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, ISBN 1416605754.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ Rapp, S. (1999-09-29). Recognizing words on sight; activity. The Baltimore Sun
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. The Massive Impact of Literacy on the Brain
